Short Takes

Simon Wiesenthal, who tracked down Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and has earned the reputation as the world's foremost Nazi hunter, doesn't seem the shy and retiring type.
But he retires frequently.
The 94-year-old Holocaust survivor, who told a British newspaper two years ago that he was stepping down from his work at his Documentation Center in Vienna, was quoted by an Austrian magazine last week as saying again that his work is done.

Last year Dr. Daniel Branovan, a Russian-born physician who serves as director of residency training at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, treated, for free, a teenager injured in a terrorist bombing in Haifa.
Last month he donated his medical services to another victim of terrorism.
Now he is encouraging his colleagues to do the same thing.

A Jesuit priest working with Mel Gibson on his controversial film about the last hours of Jesus' life says Jews need not worry about being portrayed as Christ-killers.
Father William J. Fulco, a professor of ancient Mediterranean studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, says he is "intimately familiar" with the script of Gibson's upcoming, self-financed movie "The Passion" and there is "no hint" of the deicide charge that Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus.

It was billed as a rally to protest Gov. George Pataki's proposed funding cuts for programs in naturally occurring retirement communities.
But last Thursday's event felt more like a political rally for Pataki's Democratic nemesis, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.

David Eric Borowitz was introduced to gas masks when he led a delegation of students from Yeshiva University and Stern College to Israel on the eve of the Gulf War 12 years ago. "I had hoped the last gas mask I'd ever see was in 1991," he said.
Last week he saw the gas masks again. "They were waiting for us on the seats": of the bus that carried Borowitz and 34 others in a hastily arrived Action of Unity solidarity mission from Ben-Gurion Airport to their hotel in Jerusalem.